Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia
has everything a director can possibly want. Placed both in the present
day and in the historical past, its characters range from precocious teenagers
to world-weary adults. In addition, many of them are quirky, oversexed,
conniving and even erudite. In short, they display amazing variations of
the human condition. Stoppard uses not just one plot but an avalanche of
mini plot lines tumbling towards an unexpectedly tranquil denouement.

Stoppard’s Arcadian revel has many
dimensions. The setting is a large garden room overlooking a spectacular
yet unseen garden that owes its existence to Capability Brown among others.
The garden is a metaphor of cultural and literary history. In the early
1800s, Brown’s open pastures and winding streams were transmuted into a
picturesque folly replete with cascading water, outcroppings of rocks and
decaying ruins, including a “hermitage.” It is symbolic, as Hannah, a literary
historian, says, of the “emotional breakdown” of the Romantic Movement.
The hermitage, an offstage cottage is the emotional center of gravity for
the play. Its predecessor, a gazebo, was the site of a tryst that provides
most of the humor for the first scene. Later, it became Thomasina’s grieving
tutor’s hermitage, and finally, in Scene Seven, it is the locale of the
fraudulent Bernard’s final ignominy.

History and the present adorn the
garden room with a patina of intellectual fervor and emotional intrigue.
Hannah and Bernard pursue literary history and discover long forgotten
gossip. Valentine wields family history and scientific endeavor with tantalizing
hints of chaos theory, iterated algorithms and thermodynamics. Septimus
and Thomasina explicate intellectual genius and adolescent development.
Even Hannah can not imagine how pervasive her concept of “the genius of
the place” is.

Professor John Baxley sent me a copy
of a review of Arcadia that appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical
Society in 1995. It has become my favorite review of the play. The reviewer,
Allyn Jackson, says one of the central questions of the play is “How far
can science and mathematics take us in explaining what life is all about?”
Luckily, science and mathematics don’t have to bear the entire burden of
explaining life. Arcadia also explores the contributions of literature,
scholarship, passion, music and love to the rich fabric of our lives.